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Global Governance Lab

This year, in partnership with the SFS Dean's Office, the Mortara Center will continue it's first Global Governance Lab, which includes two research groups. Last year's groups worked under two Mortara faculty:

Professor Erik Voeten worked with 15 students from the Krogh Seminar (INAF339) on the Multilateral Moneyball project initiated by the State Department's International Organization Bureau. In January the class went to the State Department where they received instructions from Erin Barkley (Deputy Assistant Secretary of State) and Andrew Hyde (Director of Regional Policy and Coordination). The challenge was to find ways to gain useful insights from data for the conduct of multilateral diplomacy. The students worked in small groups on projects they chose themselves, spanning topics such as Palestinean statehood, nuclear proliferation, climate change, and sexual abuse by peacekeepers. They performed text analyses, created on-line apps, and found ways to make it understandable to people with little knowledge of data analysis. On May 1st they presented their findings to the IO bureau, including Deputy Assistant Secretary Barkley.

Professor Abraham Newman constructed a research team to investigate the United States Securities Exchange Commission as a global governor. The team included a Post Doctoral Researcher funded by the Carnegie Endowment, a PhD student from the Government Department and five SFS freshman. The team developed a coding procedure for SEC enforcement actions and spent the semester working through all of the SEC’s enforcement actions from 2006. The results will be used to apply for external funding so that the team can extend the dataset across a longer time span. In particular, the group hopes to better understand how domestic regulators serve to shape international marketsm, especially as firms increasingly conduct business that crosses national borders.